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November 2, 2010 -- With the help of Socialist Alliance members in the growing Sudanese
community in Australia, Green Left Weekly -- Australia's leading
socialist newspaper -- publishes a regular Arabic language
supplement. The Flamecovers news from the
Arabic-speaking world as well as news and issues
from within Australia. Editor-in-chief is Soubhi Iskander is a
comrade who has endured years of imprisonment and torture at the hands
of the repressive government in Sudan.

Australian Greens MPs and federal Labor Party leaders sign the agreement to back the ALP in government.

By Ben Hillier

October 23,
2010 -- In a recent article (“A Marxist critique
of the Australian Greens”, available at marxistleftreview.org) I argue that the
Greens cannot be regarded as a left alternative to the Australian Labor Party.
My conclusions are based on the following considerations:

1. The Australian Greens is a
pro-capitalist party with no organic links to the working class – either ideologically
or organisationally.

2. The Greens is an organisation 9000 strong
that has several thousand unionists as members. Yet they have no activist base
in the union movement. There is no union/workers’ fraction in the organisation;
no Greens unionist conference; and it has no rank-and-file groups. The
organisation has made no serious attempt to intervene into the workers’
movement at all. It has a number of officers from the union movement as
members, but no organised current in the bureaucracy.

October 20, 2010 -- In the early hours of October 20, 2010, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal passed an historic milestone -- its 1,000,000th visitor (since statistics began being kept on April 4, 2008). The
unknown visitor entered site at Renfrey Clarke's essential article, "The new climate-change denialism: Who promotes it, and how to answer it".

Those 1 million visitors have collectively read more than 1.33 million articles since April 2008.

Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal's mission has been to promote the revival of a democratic, ecological, thinking, activist socialism, and to encourage and publicise the activities and views of active socialists around the world who are rebuilding the socialist and radical alternative in deed as well as word.

Links' success is especially gratifying because there were some who claimed -- when we took the decision to go solely online, rather than continue to produce the excellent but largely unread hard-copy version -- that Links was being "closed down" and was part of an abandonment of our fundamental socialist principles. Well, there are now more than a million arguments against that pessimistic forecast.

October 9, 2010 -- Green Left Weekly -- It is close to an article of faith among environmentalists that using
less energy is a big part of the solution to climate change. Energy
efficiency is often said to be the “low hanging fruit” of climate
policy. On face value, the benefits seem obvious.

The knowledge needed to make big gains in efficiency already exists.
Using less energy will save consumers and industry money, whereas other
policies will be costly. And most importantly, lower energy use could
make a big dent in global greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the
International Energy Agency both promote energy efficiency as an
important climate measure.

However, strong evidence has emerged that new energy efficient technologies alone won’t do much to cut emissions. Indeed, in a capitalist economy, it’s very likely that energy efficiency gains will lead to higher energy use, not less.

October
13, 2010 -- Ben Hillier’s article, “A Marxist critique of the Australian Greens”
(available at http://www.marxistleftreview.org/) contains some useful information and analysis on the Australian
Greens, a formation that has achieved a significant breakthrough in the recent
federal election. Hillier is correct, generally, in writing of the Greens’ “populist
left nationalism” and “middle class ideological basis”. But he over-emphasises
the sociologically middle-class nature of the Greens’ voting base (and probably
membership), as part of a general confusion on class today. In a related error,
he is quite wrong, and quite sectarian, to state that the Greens “do not in any
sense represent an alternative to the ALP” [Australian Labor Party].

Hundreds joined a bike ride for freedom in the historic city of
Ayutthaya on October 3. Sombat Boonngamanong, garlanded, is on the red bicycle second from right. Photo by Ooi ThaiDelphi/CBN Press. Published with permission.

October 6, 2010 -- Sombat Boonngamanong, a cultural activist and NGO organiser, was not one of the central leaders of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship
(popularly known as the Red Shirts) when their mass protest camp (at
the Ratchaprasong intersection in the heart of Bangkok) was bloodily
dispersed by the Thai military on May 19, 2010. Thousands were injured, 91
killed and hundreds have become political prisoners in this crackdown.
But Sombat has since emerged as a popular figure in the dramatic Red Shirts' resurgence over the last month.

One of Marx’s unique and profound contributions to socialism is his idea that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class. This is the very reason Cuba isn’t socialist... Castro took power, but the working class as the working class played no role whatsoever in the overthrow of Batista. In fact they ignored Fidel’s call for a general strike in 1958.

We understand that the FBI seized computers, passports, books,
documents, cell phones, photos, financial records, diaries, maps and
other materials using warrants were issued under a 1996 statute which
made it a crime for US citizens to provide “material assistance” to any
organisation designated by the government as “terrorist".

We condemn these raids and demand that the property seized be
immediately returned and the victims of the raids be fully compensated.
We also call for the revocation of the anti-democratic grand jury
subpoenas against some of the raided activists.

We will also approach other organisations and activists to discuss
and plan solidarity with the activists now being victimised under US
"terrorism" laws.

Statement initiated by Working People Association
(Indonesia) and Network of Progressive Youth Burma

[If
your organisation would like to sign, please email:international@prp-indonesia.org.]

September 16, 2010 -- We, the undersigned organisations, strongly condemn the military junta of
Burma for its new decree to curb workers’ right to form trade unions and its
harsh punishments against any industrial action.

The military junta of Burma -- the State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC) -- decreed a new regulation on August 20, 2010, at a meeting in
Rangoon attended by industry employers, government ministers and Burmese
military officials, including Lt-Gen Myint Swe of the ministry of defence. It stated
that, whoever launches or participates in industrial protests demanding better
rights or conditions will be fired and blacklisted. The reason for the
decree, labour activists in Burma believe, is that the junta wants to prevent
further industrial action and employers don’t want their workers taking action
to demand better wages, so now they can fire those who protest and stop them
from getting jobs elsewhere.

September 16, 2010 -- Chiangmai, in Thailand’s north, is considered to be a Red Shirt
stronghold. On August 29, a 21-year-old local Red Shirt (popular name
for the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, UDD) activist “James” Krissada
Klaharn and his girlfriend Nongnuch Kampor were driving home at about
1.15 am after a long day selling popular stickers at a roadside stall,
when the killers struck.

Nongnuch was driving. They noticed a vehicle, with headlights off,
following them. Suddenly the vehicle accelerated, pulled alongside and
sprayed their cars with bullets. Krissada was hit in the legs, abdomen
and shoulder.

September 11, 2010 -- Ten years ago, thousands of Australian activists joined forces to blockade a meeting of the powerful World Economic Forum in Melbourne for three days, beginning September 11, 2000. Despite a massive show of police force and violence, the unity of the protesters prevailed. The
atmosphere of the protest was one of of determination and festivity. There were puppets, humour, banners and placards,
songs, wandering drummers and minstrels. The crowd was diverse
with trade unionists, socialists, anarchists, environmentalists, social justice activists, high
school students, children, pensioners: a strong diversity of people
united in opposition to an undemocratic and powerful elite.

September 8, 2010 -- Up to 20,000 Red Shirt supporters rallied at a concert in the Thailand seaside resort city of Pattaya on September 4, in what was one the biggest mobilisations since the military bloodily dispersed their mass protest camp in Bangkok on May 19, 2010, killing 91 and injuring thousands more.

Red Shirt leader and Puea Thai party MP Jatuporn Prompan called on people to place red roses outside prisons around the country on September 17. Hundreds of Red Shirt leaders and activists continue to be detained. On September 18-19, actions marking four months since the massacre will be held all over the country as well as overseas.

“Today is the beginning of our campaign to open the prison doors to let our Red Shirts brothers and sisters free”, Jutaporn told the concert.

August 29, 2010 -- Blind Carbon Copy [BCC] -- Socialism was conceived as a creative and idealistic movement, but
lost its way for most of the 20th century. Recapturing this imaginative
energy can help find solutions to such huge threats as climate change.
This article started as a short impromptu speech I gave to launch the
third edition of the Australian Socialist Alliance's Climate Charter.

* * *

Socialism used to be a rallying point for idealists, utopians, dreamers
and those who were simply hopeful. It carried an almost millenarian
promise of redemption and salvation. More importantly, it allowed its
advocates to exercise their imagination. If socialism was to
democratically realise the wishes of the common working people, why
should they be restrained in their wishes?

This is the second volume
of writings and speeches by Jim Percy, one of the founders of Australia's Democratic Socialist Perspective and its longtime central leader until
his death in 1992. These seven items — reports given by Jim to
conferences and leadership gatherings of the DSP (or SWP, Socialist Workers
Party, as it was known in this period) — span the years 1980 to 1987.

August 25, 2010 -- In July 2009, the Alyawarr people in the township of Ampilatwatja, approximately 350 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, in Central Australia, walked out of the government "proscribed area" and into the desert to set up a protest camp.

This protest action was in defiance of the Northern Territory Intervention Act 2007, brought in under the conservative Coalition government of then-prime minister John Howard. The intervention was and continued under the Australia Labor Party governments of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. The Alyawarr community and others are calling for the intervention to be abolished and reinstatment of the Racial Discrimiation Act, which was suspended in order to bring in the racist Northern Territory Intervention Act.